Businesspeople have discovered Web logs to be an online and interactive marketing
tool. A good example is SherpaBlog, just launched by MarketingSherpa publisher
Anne Holland.
MarketingSherpa's Anne Holland has been amazed at the reaction to her blog. She
receives around 20 emails in a day in response to her blog.
Anne Holland regards her blog as a marketing tool, because she feels it lets readers feel
like they can reach out to the writer of a blog. The blog enables her to touch the readers
in a way that none of formal e-newsletters can. She writes in an off-the-cuff, casual
style, and a typo or two doesn’t actually matters.
Many of Anne's blog readers are her newsletter subscribers. And while she is careful
not to promote her newsletters or other information products, she is finding that those
who respond to her blogging are 10 times more likely to buy from her. This is because
people who feel a personal connection to a company are more likely to become a
customer.
She promotes her blog in every one of her e-newsletters, simply by adding a
prominently placed link.
Case Study 2 Of Existing Blog - The Power of Weblog
Matt Haughey is the founder of community weblog MetaFilter. One day he got a
telemarketer call while he was sitting at home. The cold callers were Critical IP, who
had gotten his home phone number from the central database of domain name owners.
He posted his outrage on his own weblog:
The gang at Critical IP feel the whois database is a virtual goldmine worth coldcalling
and bothering you at home (when I asked them if they got my number from the
whois database, they admitted that yes, that was how they obtained it). ...
Matt then asked other bloggers to spread the word that Critical IP was coldcalling
people while they were eating supper:
If you feel like sharing this message with anyone else, just copy this HTML and post on
your site: Critical IP sucks.
The result: over the next few days, it was noticed that dozens of blogs had linked to
Matt's post, all with the same message: "Critical IP sucks". Even today, you may find
over two-dozen weblogs linking to Matt's post.
The thought here was that the collective linking of the weblog community can achieve
a sort of mob justice, with Google searchers finding the message "Critical IP sucks"
whenever they searched for Critical IP.
As collective votes of the weblog community determine what sites you see on Google,
Matt's personal site soon became the #1 search result for google searches of "Critical
IP".
Its worth noting how frighteningly powerful weblogs are. There's even a name in the
weblog community for this phenomenon: Google Bombing. Whether it's done
accidentally or more purposefully, the very existence of this phenomenon points to the
power of Weblogs to impact the Google search experience.
Case Study 1 Of Existing Blog – Weblog As A
Educational Tool
The Nuffield Foundation started a weblog looking for ideas to support students taking
their chemistry courses and raise the participation level of online students. Creating a
www.chemistry-react.org was their first experiment with blogs.
www.chemistry-react.org proved to be an incredibly popular online genre. Soon they
realized that how easy was it to use - no user names to remember and no complicated
tools to learn how to use etc. Chemistry-react like all the best blogs became a web page
packed with great links and useful annotations.
Often blogs are used as a topical focal point for online communities, proving to be a
success where discussion boards or forums have failed. Because the content is news
oriented, it means there is always a reason to return to the site. Because the content is
time oriented, it is very easy to catch up with what has happened since your last visit.
A blog was good fit for the students taking the chemistry courses too. Taking a course
is something that happens over time. As a student, one week you are looking at
polymers, the next at acids. All the students around the world will pretty much be
experiencing the same challenges at the same time. The blog could support this
process.
Though the blog content created became popular with the students, blog owners
realized that the commenting feature wasn’t used as much as we all expected.
The story would have ended there, except for the fact that a Frequently Asked
Questions (FAQ) section was added to the blog and it was massively successful.
Students ask intelligent questions and that in turn became useful content which brought
the students back for more. Interestingly, the blog has evolved into a news delivering
part of a FAQ site.
Nuffield hit upon a format that is popular, productive and participative. They are now
developing tools to help the blog team be more effective at answering questions and
improving the usability of the FAQ’s themselves, by letting the system "learn" about
chemistry questions and answers.
The Washington State Drowning Prevention Network website was lately launched.
The majority site is built using XHTML for structure and CSS for presentation, with a
table-free layout. Most of the pages validate XHTML 1.0 Transitional and the site is a
great success, as the owner chose to use practical Web standards. The following case
study shows how was he able to achieve all the goals laid out for the site with limited
time and limited resources.
The Problem
The Drowning Prevention site has been around since around 1998 and it's not been
touched, with the exception of yearly content updates, since then. The owner of the site
did these updates before and found them particularly time consuming for a number of
reasons. The site had originally be built with FrontPage and as the years past had gone
through several different iterations, whenever he would update it something would
break or he would have to rebuild an entire page just to add a few links.
The site was in much need of an overhaul, both visually and structurally. So, a designer
sat down with him and the stakeholders and began to talk about the goals for this site.
He asked for ideas about how we wanted it laid out, what kind of visual feel and how
we wanted to reorganize the content. It was all fairly straightforward and need to be
done quickly because of the time sensitive nature of the content.
The Goals
As with every good project, we started with clear goals. Our main goals for this site
were to:
-Update the content of the site
-Update the look and feel
-Make the site more consistent
-Make the site more accessible
-Make the site easier to use
The owner had some of his own goals for the site:
-Make the site easier to update
-Future proof the site
The Solution
Because we needed a new look and feel it was realized that they need to build the site
from the ground up. There was just way to much presentational code mixed in with
their content. The designer started by creating a simple layout on paper, then later in
Photoshop and going over that with the stakeholders. Given the simplicity of the site,
this was easily done. Then a template was built. The designer began to migrate content
from the old site and mix that in with the new stuff coming from the stakeholders.
This content migration was a bit of a bear. All of the presentational elements from the
code which was time consuming were stripped out. There were a few pages in the site
that had so much going on. These were left untouched.
The designer tried to clean up the site's exiting content as much as possible. All of the
links were reorganized and retitled and did a simple, clear Information Architecture on
the site was created.
After a week or so the basic site was all built out and all of the content was migrated
and updated. It was then sent to the stakeholder for review.
A Small Wrench in the Work
Having worked out most of the browser bugs and refined the template it was felt like
the work was over. It wasn't quite that simple though. The stakeholders wanted to
make some pretty big changes to the content as well as quite a bit more updates. At
that time it was decided to make some major tweaks to the layout as well.
Blog Tools to the Rescue
These major changes and layout tweaks were done in under an hour because the site
was built using one of the blog softwares (name has not been revealed deliberately).
This made the work really easy. The actual content changes were a snap because the
code was so stripped down and clean and all the layout changes were done within the
CSS file. Without that the layout changes alone would have easily taken half a day
even using sketchy "find and replace" methods.
The stakeholders were pleased to see the work and the site launched on time.
A Few More Benefits
In addition to the benefits talked about above, by choosing to build the site with Blog
Tools and Softwares one is able to:
-Eliminate browser issues with both current and legacy browsers
-Insure forward compatibility with future browsers
-Help in analyzing how to future proof the links
-Achieve instant compatibility with most non-web devices
-Decrease the total file size from 33MB to 14MB
-Drop average page weight from 11KB to around 6KB
-Increase accessibility and usability of the site -- by default
-Radically reduce the learning curve/ training time for distributed authorship
- END of Unit V Case Study -
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